Chapter II: Part 2

Oases of enchantment where the bees
And beetles come,
To mingle with the murmur of the seas
Their drowsy hum.

Such splendor glitters in each regal nod
Of gilded bloom
We pause in doubt; is this the golden rod,
Or seraph’s plume?

A scepter, or perchance a magic wand
For elfin kings?
Our fancy pictures in each jewelled frond
Fantastic things.

And still our wonder grows, and a vague fear
Of regions banned
Steals o’er us--lest our footsteps draw too near
To fairyland!

WILD ROSES

Whence comes that swooning fragrance on the air
That riot of rich color on the hill
Like smouldering embers? red, deep red, and fair
They are, beyond our groping words. We thrill
To inner surgings of unuttered things
When we behold, strewn o’er this alien lea
Exotic bloom that to our spirit sings
In perfume sweet as lifting melody,
Fresh from immortal Eden’s radiant bowers
Where angels coveted our earthly flowers.

Like elfin torches tipped with odorous fire
Raining their ashen petals on the grass,
These flowering censers rouse a wild desire
For beauty yet unseen, in those who pass
This solitary way. O incense sweet!
The bees are drunken with it, the wild bees
And dragon flies that hunt this still retreat
Far from the world of men. Is it for these
That Nature lavishes her perfume rare
To scent this moorland waste and wandering air?

Wild roses, O but they were meant to be
More than the sweet companions of an hour;
Theirs is a loftier role, their destiny
In this sad world, to glorify the power
Of beauty welling up beyond the range
Of mortal view. Strange ecstasies concealed
Aforetime from our blighting frost and change
Aurora’s swinging gates have here revealed;
Such perfect beauty as the seraph knows
Hid in that floral miracle - a rose.

THE COAST GUARD STATION

Stout fortress on the battle line
Of shrieking winds and thunderous surge,
A barbican against the brine,
A challenge to the breakers’ dirge;
Not all the wild Atlantic’s wrath
Can bar your men from life boats frail,
Nor all the fury of the gale
Can swerve them from their destined path!

The churning foam may pelt and freeze,
The stinging sleet cut to the bone,
They venture forth on perilous seas,
They venture forth, unsung, alone.
Like knights of olden time arrayed
In oilskin armor, theirs the role
To battle with the raging shoal
And beard the tempest unafraid!

No martial strains ring in their ears,
No banners blaze their desperate way;
Only a wife or mother peers
From distant sand dunes through the spray.
And yet no crown that fame may give
Can e’re transcend the solemn pride
Of men, whatever may betide,
Who risk their lives that men may live.

KEEPER OF THE LIGHT

Aloft within the beacon tower alone
She trims the lamps that send their luminous beams
Far out into the night. The eerie moan
Of the wild shoal is smothered by the screams
Of winds that make the thrumming walls resound
With deafening din. She listens, mute with dread,
To voices mingling vaguely in the sound
Of the storm maddened waves, and shakes her head.
“Is it the waves?” she mutters. Bent and old
Her fingers tremble so,--but not from cold!

Her husband tosses on his cot below
Burning with fever, often calls her name.
But she must stand his watch though none may know
Of her long vigil. Vestal of a flame
Whose warning beams guide mariners aright
Mid perilous reefs, through all engulfing gloom
Though unclean spirits rage throughout the night
Riding the furious winds in rain and spume,
No matter if she shivers and turns pale,
Her courage, like her light, endures the gale.

But what drives hard like spray against the glass
Hurtling from out the dark? a tiny form
With battered wings, a tern which flees, alas,
Like some lost soul from the pursuing storm
Dashed to the rocks below. “Dear God!” she cries
“Why must my light that points great ships the way
“Be blooded by his piteous sacrifice?
“Life saving beams, who gave them power to slay?
“How hopelessly must good and evil blend
“When harmless birds meet such a cruel end.”

ON CHATHAM BARS

On Chatham bars the surges moan
And sea birds cry;
A gull goes winging stark and lone
Across the sky;
While on the shore, with menace low,
Mutters the seething undertow.

O’er Chatham bars a frighted cloud
Goes driven fast;
The shoals are answering hoarse and loud
The roaring blast,
And joining that wild revelry
Of frenzied winds and raging sea.

Through blinding sands with bended head
The coast guard goes
By Chatham bars, in silent dread
For well he knows,
That surf may leave, on its retreat,
Some ghastly trophy at his feet!

On Easter morn the mourners stand
On Chatham hill,
To chant again His high command,
Of - “Peace be still”
And scatter flowers upon the wave
To drift above some nameless grave.

For Chatham bars are silent now
On Easter Day,
Before that solemn group who bow
Their heads and pray
To Him, the Risen One, Who said,
“Then shall the sea give up its dead.”

THE OLD TIMER’S LAMENT

O where is the Cape that I used to know
In the quaint old days of the long ago?
The weathered house with its friendly smoke
From the looming background of silver oak;
And the huge brick oven that flanked the grate
Where the fireplace yawned like the flaming gate
Of a fairy world to my childish gaze
While the russets sputtered before the blaze--
Was there ever such comfort and homey cheer
As the Cape that my memory holds so dear?

There were braided rugs on the sanded floor
And that queer round cellar--what bounteous store
Of pickle and relish and sweet preserve
Seemed overflowing each ample curve!
What jars of berries and stewed beach plum
And jugs--half hidden--of cherry rum--
And jugs that frothed with potato yeast,
And the dainties saved for Thanksgiving’s feast
I think of them often and sigh--“Heigh-ho”
O where is the Cape that I used to know?

And that open chamber and corded bed
Where I listened to pattering rain overhead.
Rope handled sea chests and leathern trunks
And models of clippers and Chinese junks,
And apples drying in clustered strings
With numberless other wonderful things.
No cave from the storied Arabian Nights
Was filled with more treasures and marvelous sights
Than our storehouse under the eaves could show--
O where is the Cape that I used to know?

And the fragrant gardens that memory links
With the olden days--O those sweet Cape pinks,
And the hollyhocks and the columbine,
And the savory herbs by the ivy vine,
With the fish nets drying along the slope
Mid tangles of buoys and fresh tarred rope--
Yes the modern gardens are trim and neat
But I often think--“Do they smell as sweet
“As those beds where the roses loved to grow?”
O where is the Cape that I used to know?

The captains turned from the seven seas
To end their days in such homes as these;
And the tales they spun for my youthful ear
I have waited a lifetime their like to hear.
But they sleep where the mournful willows bend
O’er that silent city where voyages end;
Though their memory lingers in many a page
Of log books crumbling with salt and age,
And many a rare old curio--
O where is the Cape that I used to know?

But time flows on like the ceaseless tide
And cabins clutter the country side
Like nesting gulls. Where the horse, hock deep,
Once plodded the sands the autos sweep
Before my eyes in a dizzy blur
Of mad confusion and noise and stir.
For peace and quiet have never a place
In this modern world with its feverish pace

With its movie glare and its radio--
O where is the Cape that I used to know?

REVERY

Sweet angel of the backward look
And trailing wings,
We wander by Time’s restless brook
Of transient things
That from some far off, unseen nook
Forever springs.

Old Time may lay aside his glass
For just a day,
Let not the jewelled moments pass
But bid them stay,
The while we stretch upon the grass
In revery.

THE OLD HULK

Moored to the decaying piling
Of a ruined wharf, and whiling
Endless hours away in dreams of days gone by,
Lies a battered hulk, dismasted,
Broken backed and tempest blasted,
Like a dolphin fast aground and left to die.

Deck awash and planking slanted
Like a broken lily planted
In the mud, where every tide the eddies swirl,
Years have gone since last it floated
And the sea growths all unnoted,
Underneath its rotting timbers twine and curl.

Often when my footsteps tended
To that lonely shore that ended
All its voyagings there sounded in my ear,
What the shrilling sea birds uttered
And the voiceless current muttered
Solemn messages it meant for me to hear;

“Far off seas no more beguile me
“But their memories reconcile me
“To the shelter of this silver mirrored cove
“Where my outline seems engraven
“Like an etching. Safe in haven
“I am home at last, and nevermore shall rove.”

THE MODERNISTS

Bam, wham!
Clangor of cymbals and shriek of a fife,
That stabs like a knife.
Zam, slam!
Bang on the tambourine, beat on the drums,
Symphony comes!
Greet her with tom-toms while savages dance,
Let any discord the riot enhance,
Down with all melody, harmony, poise,
Give us more noise!
Tonal inebriates, drunken with sound,
Pound, brothers, pound!
Furiously, frenziedly, round and around
Whirls the mad medley of ear splitting notes,
Like the yelling of demons with flame blackened throats.

Music is stricken, is dying, ’tis said,
Over her head,
Set all the boiler works off on a spree!
Jazz and more jazz in a mad jamboree,
Music is dead!

But still in the morning the song sparrow sings
And blithely she wings,
And from her gay throat a sweet melody springs,
Old as the Pyramids, new as the dawn,
Music will live when this madness has gone.

Blah, blurb!
Pronoun and verb.
For poetry give us a barbaric yawp
Slop, Stop!
The stuff that some long haired Bohemian raves
Would make Keats and Tennyson turn in their graves
Miscalled free verse,
And trash that is worse.
Nothing too banal or trite or absurd,
Such is the artistic triumph preferred,
To melodies sung
When old Homer was young.
Out with the rhyming brook, limpid and pure,
Open a sewer!

Let the nymph Poesy cover her face,
Downcast and blushing at such a disgrace.
Garbage of words and cesspool of thought
Columns and pages of rubbish and rot,
Only a blot!

This is not Poesy spawned in the mire,
High on Olympus she still sounds her lyre
With the immortals. Her rapt, vibrant fire
Blasts like a flame
All the abortions brought forth in her name.

Smear, daub!
Plaster on canvas an unsightly gob
Yellow and scarlet and purple and pink,
Looks like a mess that has spilled in the sink.
But call it a sunset o’er Harlem, in truth
Or a beautiful woman enamoured with youth.
Just a name, any name that you think of will do,
And if you insert a poor outline or two,
Be sure that you violate all the known rules.
The masters were fools!
For painting is only a sleep walker’s trance.
Walpurgis is with us so on with the dance!
For the forms that great Phidias carved out of stone
Misshapen monstrosities, muscle and bone
Now simper and leer,
At vapid admirers who openly jeer
At beauty of tinting or outline or form
And foment a storm,
Of sickly approval at each newest fright
That clutters our galleries, angers our sight.
For art is a blight!

O that some genius great hearted and sane
Would banish such trash of a disordered brain!
For beauty will ever be noble and fine
And speaking through music or color or line
Her voice is divine!

WHEN THE LOCUSTS ARE IN BLOOM

When the locusts are in bloom
Every bud - a riven tomb
Yields a spirit form, emerging pure as snow,
Dancing lightly on the breeze
Like the foam on fairy seas,
Swinging like enchanted censers to and fro.

And the moonbeams, white and chaste,
Through the branches interlaced,
How they seem to drip into each ivory cup,
Where anon, the summer heats
Mingle all those honeyed sweets
That the bee, with nectar drunken, loves to sup.

Wondrous pendants set with gems
Clinging to the swaying stems
How each chalice overflows into the stream
Of the scented hours that glide
Down a timeless, golden tide
To the islands where the lotus eaters dream.

So we idly float along
On the bluebird’s lilting song
To a region where the blossoms never die.
For through all the cloying hours
In the thralldom of the flowers
Fancy roams in far off cloudlands of the sky.

THE HARVEST OF THE SEA

It is harvest time in the teeming sea
And the surges labor tirelessly
Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam
They garner the harvest and carry it home,
Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat
As they strew it in windrows at our feet.

Slender strands like a whip lash, tear
At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair
And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps
All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps
Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow
From sunken glens where the sea things grow.

Eel grass rolled by the waves at play
In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;
Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:
And Irish moss with its mottled green
And cream and purple and pink and brown
From the matted gulfs where sailors drown!

Algae dyed like a fresh blown rose
Red is their telltale hue that glows
On the white sands edging the brooding sea.
A network of delicate imagery
Like the thin fine lines of an etching traced
That the blundering surges have not erased.

Harvest from tide tilled fields that bloom
Deep down where the sunlight fades in gloom.
Gardens of sinister mystery
Under the waves of the heaving sea.
Gardens the living may never know
Where dead men drift in the ebb and flow!

Jungles where fishes and creatures strange
Through the lush profusion may freely range.
Not for the living but for the dead
Are those fields submerged that we may not tread,
But their harvest is scattered within our reach
By the wild waves mourning along the beach.

BEACH GRASS

Tremulous as elfin lances
Are the thin shafts of the beach grass,
Blades and tufted points that quiver
Eerily to winds of midnight;
Magic strings on lyres enchanted,
Strings that strum a lilting cadence
Played upon by fairy fingers.

Beach grass blades that whirl and struggle
In the clutch of boisterous breezes.
Needle tips that mark strange circles
In the cowering sands beneath them,
Tracings of a fairy stylus,
Runic etchings vague and ghostlike.

Tenuous roots, like bamboo jointed
Delving, burrowing neath the surface
Of the rough hewn sand dunes moulded
By great Nature’s groping fingers;
(Waves and tempests are her fingers)
With their living network binding
Crumbling sands that melt and vanish -
In a woven web of fibre.
Threading with tenacious purpose
Mantles lovely and protective,
Till the battered landscape brightens
Smiles through scars and cruel gashes
Smiles in glossy, rippling beach grass
Undulating in the breezes
Like a field of ripened barley.

Beach grass, desperate, clinging, gripping
Braving wrath of winter tempests,
Scourged by sands that sting like nettles,
Blinding clouds that lash and smother,
Wet with driven spume and frosted,
With the salt and oft half buried,
As the tortured dunes roll landward,
Uncouth monsters, struggling, straining
By the rage of Neptune driven
Stumbling, sprawling, lurching onward.

But the beach grass, fragile, yielding
Like a seine whose mesh entangles,
Binds their heaving bulks together -
In a fibrous web of rootlets;
Gripping fiercely for each foothold
Yielding grudgingly and battling
Till the storm winds howl in fury,
And the baffled ocean smothers
Futile wrath in foam and roaring,
Till the lowly beach grass triumphs;
Holds in magic chains the forces
Of ungovernable chaos.

Beach grass drawing life and nurture
From the sterile sands, a living
Energy from out the desert.
Hardy warrior, silent tamer
Of primeval urgings rampant,
Barrier to the clamorous ocean,
Staunch preserver of the landscape,
Not content with curbing surges
Or restraining restless sand dunes,
How you bless that sterile desert
With your wild and pensive beauty;
Cover o’er its savage harshness
With the mantle of your verdure
Till your patient, steadfast purpose
Glorifies the vanquished sea shore.

THE SWAMP HERON

“Quawk”, comes that harshly guttural note
In the night stillness, hear it? “Quawk”.
A hoarse “good hunting” from the throat
Of a night heron, feathered gawk,
Ungainly, droll, the awkward child
And threadbare outcast of the wild.

’Tis not his custom to intrude
Where others are, while on his way
To his beloved solitude
Nor has he overmuch to say;
His only greeting is a squawk
But filled with cheer, a friendly “Quawk”.

Thanks, humble neighbor of the moors
For such philosophy is rare;
Though neither grace nor charm are yours
You envy no one, nor compare
Their lissome poise - your stilt like walk!
Their lilting song - your throaty “Quawk”.

He knows, illfavored bird of night
The finest feathers in the dark
Are little worth, nor pleasing flight
Nor beauty’s form with none to mark;
Contented but to nightly stalk
His supper like a wise old quawk.

THE THROES OF CREATION

Crash and a smother of foam
Drowned in a booming roar!
That is the way the surge comes home
Pounding along the shore.

Hiss and a seething tongue
Laps at the crumbling sand!
That is the way the sea has wrung
Room from the grudging land.

Rasp of the undertow
As its white tongue flays the beach,
Flensing the pebbles to and fro
Into its treacherous reach.

Ever the sob and moan
Of the tortured ledges rings
Grinding to dust and welding to stone
Ever the hammer swings.

Never a solid ground
Nor a fixed and steadfast place;
Shoals new risen and islands drowned
Sculpture the landscape’s face.

Thus were the corners laid
For the continents and the seas;
That is the way the world was made
Out of such conflicts as these.

Up from the ocean’s bed;
Into the ocean cast
Surging through infinite ages ahead
Out of an infinite past.

The Methodist Meeting House at South Truro was known to many old
timers as Hog’s Back Church. The following verses were written
while it was still standing, though long deserted and neglected.
But to those who knew and admired it, as I did, it deserves
something more than the simple granite slab that marks its site.
For it remains a lasting memory of a former era on old Cape Cod.]

HOG’S BACK CHURCH

Foursquare it stands!
A stalwart witness year by year
To courage steadfast but austere.
The toilworn hands
That shaped its beams and laid its floors
Are folded now. The toilers lie
In marble dotted rows nearby
Though some found graves on distant shores
And some were lost at sea!
This fickle, carefree world might heed
Those iron men of Pilgrim breed,
Though rude their lives and stern their bent
They built a during monument
To strict integrity.

Foursquare it stands!
And gazes out o’er Pamet Bay
Once whitened by the sails that lay
Where now are choking sands.
The weathered houses prim and square
That marked the hillsides everywhere
Have disappeared,
But that old church in stately pride
Still dominates the countryside;
Is still revered.

Foursquare it stands!
The dust upon the pulpit lies
Whence lurid texts and prophecies
Were hurled like burning brands.
No more the silent walls are stirred
By thunders of Jehovah’s wrath
That seekers for the “Narrow Path”
Once, trembling, heard;
They reverenced an awful Name
And glimpsed the pit of quenchless flame
In God’s own word.

Foursquare it stands on hallowed ground
And from its lonely windswept height
A landmark like a beacon light
Its spire is seen for leagues around.
Though times may change, and changing creeds
Are modified to modern needs
Still staunch and true,
Memorial of a former age
It keeps the priceless heritage
From olden time to new.

The plaster from the ceiling falls
On creaking floors, and in the dead
Of night there sounds the ghostly tread
Of phantom footsteps. But the walls
Still battle with the winter gale
That roars about the ancient spire,
Nor all its torrents can avail
To drown that spark of living fire -
The spirit of that temple set
On crowning heights, lest men forget!

Foursquare it stands!
The bell, long silent, seems to ring
And to the world its message fling;
“I yield alone to God’s commands.
“Though all about may change, not I.
“True to my settled destiny
“I still remain.
“Though constancy be but a wraith
“Steadfastly I have kept the faith
“And shall maintain
“That faith, unfaltering, down the years
“Through all the shoals of doubts and fears,
“A lighthouse on that shoreless sea
“That broadens to Eternity”.

There, like the Sphinx the old church broods
Among its deepening solitudes.
In simple grandeur let it stand
For years unborn, to bless the land,
And when its timeworn tower has gone
Still may its memory linger on.

* * * * *

_Struck by lightning in a thunder storm
on the night of March 21, 1940 and
totally destroyed._

BEYOND THE POINT

A ridge of sand dunes barricades the rim
Of the horizon like a gilded bar
To roving sight; a lonely point, the brim
Of earth against the moaning surge. Afar
My glances wander, wistfull, ill at ease
From longing to explore those far off seas.

The murmuring tide creeps up before my feet
And leaves a shell or two, a broken spray
Of strange sea growth; then to some chill retreat
In ocean’s depths it slowly ebbs away.
How blithely thought can trail the screaming terns
Beyond the boundaries that the eye discerns!

On the horizon looms that point beside
The pathless main, a prison door to me;
For I would follow on that restless tide
To lands remote beyond a shoreless sea;
Through shimmering haze how like a magic wand
That dune ridged finger beckons me beyond!

The rolling hills enclose me and the sky
Bends overhead, but these are different things;
Somehow they do not seem to press so nigh
As that wind fretted wall of sand that rings
My little world about, and intervenes
To shut my vision from enchanted scenes.

And though in happier days I sailed those seas
Around the globe upon the buoyant trades
To Ceylon, Singapore and Celebes,
Beheld their fanes and trod their tropic glades
Those voyages leave me still unsatisfied
In this lone cottage where I now abide.

Beyond the point what vistas of romance
Of golden kingdoms still their wealth unfold:
Though fettered by the bonds of circumstance
My failing vision and my limbs grown old
Among the embers of my memories
One lingering flame, adventure, never dies.

THE WINDS OF TIME

O the winds of time sweep the lonely years
Like withered leaves down the path of night,
And their notes, like a dirge, sound in our ears
As our eyes are strained for a glimpse of light.
And our sad heart utters a voiceless prayer -
Whence do ye come - ye bitter winds,
Where do ye go - O where?

Through the swarming suns where the Zodiac’s blaze
Fades out in the awful deeps of space,
As you hurry us on your unknown ways,
Shall our feet leave never a trace?
Rushed from the light to the silent dark,
Tell us, tell us, O mocking winds
Is there a voice - O hark!

And the wondrous things we planned to do
In those far off days when our hearts were young.
But the task was long and the hours were few
And the songs we dreamed of are still unsung.
Will our hopes fade out when the light is gone?
Whisper, whisper, O pitiless winds,
Is there another dawn?

Where are the friends that we used to know?
Like the fallen leaves gone one by one.
And the scenes that we loved in the long ago
Faint shadows still in the setting sun.
They have gone - we go - for the wild winds rave -
“The path that ye tread in silent dread
Leads on to an open grave!”

But those voices hushed, they linger yet
Like the haunting chords of a lost refrain.
And those scenes we can see with a sweet regret
Though their outlines are blurred they still remain
Shall they live - those things - in our groping brain,
Like the ocean’s surge in an empty shell
Nor live elsewhere again?

TO AN AGED WILLOW

Ancient willow, drooping low
Gnarled old trunk and withered bough.
Though they say you’re dying now
I can never have it so.

Massive limbs against the sky
Wrestling with the winds of heaven,
E’en the thunder crashing levin
Like old Ajax you defy.

Where your mournful branches bend
Countless birds their nests have made
Woodland songsters unafraid.
You, old willow, were their friend.

And you sheltered me as well,
Often in the summer’s heat
Idly musing at your feet
I have felt your soothing spell.

Rustling softly through the leaves
Pendulous to every air,
Peace and solace everywhere
Dripped like raindrops from the eaves.

And the white clouds floating by
Bore me to the shores of dreams -
Blissful yet the memory seems -
Loved companion, must you die?

No cathedral’s gloomy nave
Or cold monument for me,
Rather let me have a tree
As a marker for my grave.

And the Land of Yet-to-Be
Where sun risen glories play,
May it see you clothed some day
In immortal greenery.

THE OLD WOODS ROAD

It blunders off through ways obscure
The old woods road I used to tread,
Until its columned walls immure
The sunbeams dripping overhead.

Through scented gloom it seems to wind
O’er fallen branches mossy green,
And leaving all the world behind
Gropes blindly toward a world unseen.

The ancient wheel ruts disappear
With pine and scrub oak overgrown,
No creaking wain for many a year
Has trailed its coverts wild and lone.

“I wonder where that old road goes?”
I hear some blithe young voices say
And I might tell them if I chose
“Back to the land of yesterday.”

THE POVERTY WEED

O the poverty weed is so shabby and poor
That she seems to disfigure the land,
The russet clad waif of the desolate moor
She buries her face in the sand.

Her threadbare old mantle all faded and frayed
What beauty can ever adorn?
As she cowers in the background this shy desert maid
So lowly, despised and forlorn.

But over that moorland in splashes of gold
Like sunbeams enriching the gloom,
What visions of loveliness seem to unfold
When the poverty weed is in bloom!

Aglow are those hillsides once barren and lone
And golden those patches of green,
When this poor floral outcast comes into her own
And the blossoms all bow to their queen.

THE SWEEP OF THE TIDES

Out of the fathomless ocean
Shaking the earth with their strides,
Chaos resurgent in motion,
Battle the foam bearded tides.
Titans stupendous, upheaving,
Flouting the roaring Monsoon,
Hoarse with the joy of achieving
Freedom to reach for the moon.

Titans whose dungeons are riven
Sped on their turbulent path,
Not by Poseidon driven
Nor by grim Eolus’ wrath,
Clamorous, never delaying,
Scouring the outermost dune,
Sullen but ever obeying
That mocking enchantress - the moon.

Fundy is choked with their foaming,
Fiercely they snarl ’round the Horn,
Glinting like steel in the gloaming,
Patined with gold at morn;
White with the ice of the Behring,
Green with sargassum strewn
Wolves of the deep, never nearing,
But ever pursuing the moon.

Round and around and forever
Dizzily circling the globe;
Torn by impassioned endeavor
Clutching, to touch but her robe;
Wraithlike that robe, but enduring,
Trailing her silvery lune,
Woven of moonbeams alluring,
Tracing the path to the moon.

Formless, uncouth, terrifying,
Goading the indolent seas;
Breathing out clouds with their sighing,
Draining the deep of its lees,
Mountainous troughing and cresting,
Then calm as a coral lagoon,
Limitless yearning and questing
Madness bewitched by the moon.

Monstrous caress of the ocean
Fondling the obdurate land,
Urged by abyssmal emotion
Granite may hardly withstand,
Beats of a world olden measure
Savage but roughly in tune,
Floodtime and ebb at the pleasure
Of that horned enchantress - the moon.

Alternate plunge and upheaval
Strong as earth giants who strove
Grandly in aeons primeval
Braving omnipotent Jove;
Forces terrific, whose rages
Drown out the shrieking Typhoon
Storming through infinite ages
After a phantom - the moon!

LOST BILLINGSGATE

From Billingsgate the beacons’s flash
No longer stabs the quivering dark,
But fang like breakers foam and gnash
Above its sand bars ribbed and stark.
Where whispering grasses used to grow
And nesting terns their shelter made,
Now snarls the rasping undertow
And breezes mutter - half afraid!

For it has gone like Lyonnesse
Of Arthur’s reign - enchanted realm
Of dreamy eyed forgetfulness
That saw the ocean overwhelm
Her shores, till e’en the towers were drowned
Where Merlin spun his evil spells,
And fishers startle - when the sound
Wells upward as from sunken bells!

Yes, Billingsgate is lost to view
Beneath the all engulfing sea,
The lonely Isle the Pilgrims knew -
But still it lives in memory.
And sometimes in the dead of night
We hear the shoal bemoan its fate
Clothed in a shroud of breakers white -
The ghost of vanished Billingsgate!

TRANSFORMED

A battered thing it seems
That salt encrusted drift wood, but the skies
Showed never rainbow with more gorgeous dyes
Than gild that firelight’s beams.

The cloud banks dull and grey
Far in the west, are but a canvas spread
For supernatural scenes in gold and red
When ends the dying day.

The icy Frost King lays
His finger on the leaves and lo, the fires
Of fairy land on autumn’s funeral pyres
Seem everywhere ablaze.

And so each inner trace
Of life’s deep grief and cankered bitterness
Is graven in those lines of kindliness
Upon an aged face.

HAUNTING ECHOES

The music dies upon the strings
But lingers on
Like other sweetly treasured things
Here once - and gone.

The breeze that blurs the mirror pool
Cannot erase
The outline of the forest cool
Upon its face.

The haunting fragrance of the flowers
Of yesterday
Not all the intervening hours
Can steal away.

And loving friends we used to know
Nor e’er forget
Although they left us long ago
Seem with us yet.

LOST AT SEA

Through bushes half obscured, a marble slab
Peers out like a pale face. Inscribed upon
Its weathered surface that the lichen growth
And winter’s storms have blurred, a few brief words
The curious eye may spell with labored care.
To “H” and “M” - perhaps - and the terse phrase
So haunting in its stark simplicity
And pathos, - “Lost at sea.” The changeless gulfs
Of ocean knew the dead man mentioned here
Where bushes riot o’er an empty grave,
But what old friend remembers him today?
Ofttimes, no doubt, upon the wet sea sand
He traced his name in childhood, while the waves
Erased the halting script. Another hand
Has etched that name in form more durable;
But year by year, the ceaseless ebb and flow
Of time’s remorseless tides obliterate
The letters shrunken to initials faint,
And that last solemn statement - “Lost at sea”.
Much has been written on the vanity
Of human life, but never penned more tense
With meaning than this lonely epitaph
Set in a thicket on a crumbling stone.

THE ASPEN

Lonely aspen rising high
Straight and true you greet the eye.
Bent by every passing breeze
Weakest, slenderest of trees;
Yet what grace, what stateliness
Every leaf and twig express!

Brittle limbs of little worth,
How from out thy meager girth
May we fashion wood for use?
What may be the frail excuse
For thy lovely shaft of green
On the verge of my ravine?

But the aspen, wise and shy
Never deigned to make reply.
Swayed to every wandering air
Shed its beauty everywhere,
Till its friendly dignity
Made its message clear to me.

God designed thee, aspen slim
Who am I to question Him?
In the mighty scheme of things
You and I play minor strings
Yet your part has been well done
Mine is only half begun!

THE SONG OF THE SEA GULLS

Hark how the sea gulls are screaming with glee
Piercing as Pipes of Pan!
Keening their songs to the beach and the sea
Sung since the world began;
O’er breakers combing in jubilant strife,
Flecked with their foaming and throbbing with life,
Here they come homing - O shrill as a fife
List to their wild elan!

They are the spirits exultant and free,
Up in the clouds they belong.
Ever aspiring in skyland to be,
Theirs is the verve of the strong.
Here they go steering through canyons of air,
Onward careering, and eager to dare,
Scornful of fearing with never a care
List to the lilt of their song!

BROKEN FRAGMENTS

Only a bit of broken glass
Half concealed in the tangled grass,
But the sunbeam found a pathway through
On its arrow flight from the vault of blue
And straight through the weed grown thicket came
To touch that glass with its kindling flame.

Only a sunbeam’s glinting gold
On a splintered bit that we now behold
Rich with crimson and purple sheen
Autumn yellow and vernal green
Until, transfigured, it glows arrayed
In the rainbow aura the sunbeam made.

Only an old man bent and gray
Gazing into the far-away.
Human wreckage forlorn and lone
But his face with a sudden glory shone.
Was it the sunbeam’s magic wand
Or hidden splendors he glimpsed beyond?

Only a bit of shattered glass,
And a poor old man that we idly pass,
But the shard like a diamond, glittered bright
And the time worn face suffused with light,
When the gates in the jasper walls swung wide
And those broken fragments were glorified.

WORKERS OF MAGIC

Immured in the downy cocoon
A marvelous artisan spins
With threads like the beams of the moon
So gossamer fine. Have the Djinns
Who dream in the mulberry trees,
O weaver beyond compare,
Bewitched with the shimmer of orient seas
Your fabric so lustrous and fair?
Toiler imprisoned who weaves and weaves
A silken glory from naught but leaves.

To the mollusc, tormented, which holds
The irritant sand in his shell,
What radiant vision unfolds
Invoked by the mermaiden’s spell?
As he fashions that shape, and imbues
It with colors he never has seen,
With opalescent and rainbow hues,
A pearl with the fairylike sheen
Of the sea. O artist whom fate condemns
To gild with beauty this queen of gems.

In his desolate attic alone
In the gloom of the midnight hour,
The poet, despondent, unknown
Is thrilled by that wizardly power
That the silk worm and pearl oyster feel
The urge to create! And his brain
Like the anvil resounding to steel
In a minstrelsy vibrant with pain,
Sends sparkles blazing through singing lines
As the verse with his burning thought combines.

MY GOLDEN FLEECE

When but a child my eyes would oft forsake
The blurring page, and through the window seek
Like an escaping bird, the wonderland
Of dreams, till my instructor, grave, enquired
“Wool gathering again?” So mid the halls
Of classic learning out into the world
Of bruise and bitterness but softening all
As summer haze dissolves the jagged peaks
And makes the deserts bloom - my fancy blithe,
Drinking the waters of eternal youth,
Has ventured many a lordly enterprise
Wool gathering down the years.
Now older grown
Calm in the tranqil gloaming of my life
I dwell apart, the while my mellow lamp
With tapestry of shadow drapes the wall
And e’en the crickets shrilling greets my ear
Like pipes of Arcady. There friends long gone
Cluster about with gladsomeness, and scenes
From recollection gleaned or fancy limned
Expand my chamber to horizons vast
Till pensively I muse “Wool gathering still?”

Bless all kind fairies of fond Memory’s brood,
Or those which grace Imaginations court,
For treasures such as these. Jason of old,
Who led his argonauts through seas of blood
Seeking the golden fleece, has set the course
For dreamers through all ages yet to come.

O Hero legended, thine be the goal
My yearning eyes would glimpse. What cloudland slopes
Feed those immortal sheep whose fleeces bright
Are woven into dreams are ever hid
Beyond my ken. But the great quest is mine
To glorify the drabness of the years
Life’s sterile day by day.
One need not gain
The fabled hoard that marks the rainbow’s end
To feel, beholding that resplendent arch
A link with faery land. Wool gathering - yes
But rather say the guerdon wisdom brings,
The magic touch that gilds the commonplace
With beauty and delight, the lustrous threads
In life’s rough fabric drawn from fleece of gold.

THE LONE LILAC

Only a cellar broken
Down to a dimpled mound,
Of the olden time a token
In the brier entangled ground.

And a lonely lilac vagrant
As a sunbeam lost in gloom,
Close by like a garland fragrant
At the door of a crumbling tomb.

Full many a tree appearing
Has ploughed through the sodden loam
Where once was a fertile clearing
Protecting a friendly home.

And sweet as the perfume welling
From the lilac over the way,
Was life in that quaint old dwelling
In that long forgotten day.

Under the eaves, enfolded
It mothered its little brood;
But the sills long since have molded
To dust in that solitude.

Now through the locusts treading
(A grove from a single one)
Like the virile banyan spreading
Neath the burning Indian sun.

We can vision those fields in culture;
And the beds once bright with flowers,
Where a crow now sits like a vulture,
And broods through the sunlit hours.

While stark through the verdure risen
Like the tides in the distant bay,
Through a cleft in its leafy prison
Peers the lilac over the way.

Anon as the breezes bluster,
Then die and are strangely mute,
The echoing memories cluster
Like strains from a far off lute.

We can almost hear the fingers
Strumming an elfin lay -
For the soul of that home still lingers
In the lilac over the way.

FRIENDLY LIGHTS

Welcome greetings through the dark
From the lamp light burning clear
In some lonely home, a spark
Radiating warmth and cheer.

Lighthouse darting from the lea
Flaming lances o’er the foam,
Wandering mariners at sea
You are guiding safely home.

Glow worm on a summer night
Torch within an elfin hand,
Marking by your zig zag flight
Ways obscure to fairy land.

Starry twinkle in the blue
To illumine worlds on high
Far off orb we share with you
Friendliness of earth and sky.

TO MY CHERRY BLOSSOM

From old Japan beyond the sea
A fairy vision beckons me,
A vale where cool the shadows rest
From Fujiyama’s towering crest,
A ruined temple’s crumbling wall
Lulled by a drowsy waterfall,
A shrine in whose corroding bell
Faint murmurs, long forgotten, dwell,
And Buddha, brooding day by day
Dreams the slow centuries away
In old Japan.

There might the careworn find release
In calm Nirvana’s perfect peace.
There might the traveler inhale
The haunting sweetness of that vale,
An incense from the flowery gloom
Where clustering cherry blossoms bloom
In petaled purity that glows
Like Fujiyama’s drifting snows;
The fragrance of a far off clime
From some remote, forgotten time
In old Japan.

There might I roam in fancy free
That Orient vale beyond the sea,
By Nippon’s shores an Eden seek
Neath Fujiyama’s storied peak.
But here, - where happier far, I’d be
A CHERRY BLOSSOM blooms for me.
I glimpse within her starry eyes
A nearer view of Paradise,
My Shrine and Eden is our home,
Nor need my wandering fancy roam
To old Japan.

GRAINS OF SAND

Fine gleanings of the ledges, golden grains
That ponderous glaciers reaped long, long ago
From battlemented crags and furrowed plains
Grinding and crushing with resistless flow,
To mingle with the melting seas, and heap
Their flinty harvestings in windrows; strew
The granite kernels for the thunderous deep
To winnow endlessly and grind anew.

Where are those lordly peaks that once defied
The fury of the gales, nor deigned to bow
To heaven’s own lightning? How the scornful tide
Washes about and putters with them now;
Yes, even my weak fingers have the power
To fashion as I will or idly thrust
Into a glass to mark the fleeting hour,
These grains of sand - some crumbled mountain’s dust

THE FUNERAL WREATH

There is a cottage trim and neat,
Who dwelt within I cannot say,
It seemed so homey a retreat,
My steps have often led that way.
But now a wreath is hung before
Its silent door.

A funeral wreath of sombre tone
Where Death has shed a ray of gloom;
And someone mourns for someone gone
Within a vacant darkened room.
So eloquent of human grief
Is every leaf!

Such is the laurel crown that waits
Our journey’s end through toil and tears;
The emblem grim that decorates
Your door and mine, e’er many years
So that some idle passer by
May wonder why!

MEMORY

She crouches in the caves of thought
Enchantress, brooding o’er the fire,
And those her mystic charms have sought
Shall sometime gain their heart’s desire.
With mumblings and averted gaze
She weaves her spells, while to and fro
Like shadows from the mounting blaze,
Upon the walls there come and go
The scenes of far off happier days
Faint visions of the long ago.

The eastern tyrant steals in dead of night
Down rock hewn stairs and through an iron door;
And feasts his eyes by flaring torch’s light
Upon the wealth heaped on his treasury floor;
On bursting sacks of coin, caskets of gems
Scepters of ruby, diamond diadems,
A kingdom’s plunder. We, like him, have stored
Our hidden wealth, and memory keeps the key,
No jewels lustreless, are in our hoard
But trophies of a richer dynasty,
The sweet experiences that time endears
Sifted and winnowed gleanings of the years.

With halting steps and labored breath we climb
The attic stairs and rummage sadly through
The toys and trifling things our childhood knew,
Until our brooding thoughts are lost to time,
And like the dust motes dancing in the beams
Come thronging memories through a mist of dreams.

Forth from an aged tome there falls a flower
Faded and crumbling, yet its petals glow,
Once more in the sweet memory of that hour
When loving fingers gave it long ago.

As through the spectral city of the dead
With downcast eyes and reverential tread
We note the broken columns and the urns
In marble draped, and e’er our gaze returns
To our own name graved on the granite bare
The death date blank - yet it will soon be there!

Then Memory leads us with a sad, sweet smile
Among those grass grown mounds. On many a stone
Are names of those we loved - A little while
And we shall be with them among our own.
We seem to hear their welcoming voices ring;
A whisper comes - “O death where is thy sting?”

Alone we came into this world - alone
We venture forth. And recollections fond
Are all that we may bear to the beyond
To lay, some day, before a great white throne!

Our life has been a path forlorn that winds
Forever on through gnarled and twisted years
Of forest gloom. A path that memory finds
And helps us trace it backward through our tears.

Upon a beechen trunk, deep in the bark
Two carven hearts by single arrow cleft:
How many years since youth, with ardent hand
Inscribed them there. Two hearts and one bereft!

In the long autumn afternoons we go
By russet moors and watch the slanting rays
Bathe all the landscape with a golden haze
That melts its harsher outlines. Thus the flow
Of years has smoothed away each grief and pain
Of childhood and life’s later bitterness,
While Memory, with a witching tenderness,
Has glorified the things that still remain.

In pensive revery our fancy turns
Out to the west where the red sunset burns,
Fain would we ponder when our sun may set
And yield to the sad sweetness of regret,
But Memory thrills with wild ecstasies
Before that miracle of blazing skies.

In awe we gaze as lengthening shadows loom
And night peers forth. But Memory hovers near
We clutch her fingers in the deepening gloom
And trembling hang upon her words of cheer,
Till with a hopeful glance she points afar
Where, like a gem on velvet, gleams a star!

We stand aghast beneath the vaulted dome
Aglitter with creation’s rhapsodies
The countless stars. And let our fancy roam
Through space unfathomed, past the Pleiades
Out to the deeps beyond. Until the veil
That shuts us from the past seems strangely stirred
And recollections vague - beyond the pale -
Flit through our brain, half thoughts confused and blurred.
A former life upon some sunnier sphere!
Things long forgot and dimly sensed again
Far off, for one rapt moment hover near.
We strive to clutch them, but we strive in vain.
Does Memory mock us, or in fear perchance

Shield us from some grim Terror’s Gorgon glance
That glares unseen, from out the dark! Farflung
A wisp of cloud darts like a dragon’s tongue
And laps Orion’s belt. At glowing dawn
The constellations fade - the veil is drawn!

The blood stained trail of history winds away
Through ruined cities and past crumbling walls
Half buried, where the tottering columns sway
To winds that blunder through the vacant halls.
Beyond lie relics of remoter time
Dolmens and cromlechs, monoliths of stone
Inscriptions weird and uncouth monsters carved
On cavern walls, and bits of splintered bone
Traced when the hairy mammoth ranged among
Wild fens and woodlands when the world was young.

For all the runes inscribed on History’s page
As Time’s slow finger etched them age by age
For our dim eyes to see,
Are but the priceless, deathless heritage
Of Memory.

The traveler venturing into deserts grim
That shimmer on the hot horizon’s rim,
Does battle with the demons of the heat
While sands like burning fingers, claw his feet
But other wayfarers have braved the wrath
Of scorching wastes - their bones still mark the path!

Our counsellor and guide, calm Memory holds
The golden balances whose scale unfolds
The wisdom of the tried - experience true.
The balance trembles, what ought we to do?
It dips, it falls, the standard points the way
Today’s decisions rest on yesterday.

Upon the shores of Time’s vast sea we stand
And peer into the gathering mists that rise
Dark and portentious before our eyes,
While through our fingers slip the grains of sand.
We know the waves advancing, will not stay
But wash our stumbling footprints all away.

Into that sea have sailed the winged hours
Like argosies by youthful fancy sent
On joyous quest to some far Orient
Created in our dreams, pagoda’d towers
To bold adventure beckoning gaily on,
While tropic skies lent their romantic lure.
But those exotic hours, alas, have gone
And broken memories alone endure.

O time may rob us of our dearest friends.
But not our memories! The present blends
Into the vanished vistas of the past.
Riches have taken wings but at the last
A pittance left us. Old, we yet may drink
From youth’s eternal fount. A golden link
Still binds us with the loved we see no more.
The lamp lit circle on our chamber floor
Our little kingdom bounds. Within its space
Our eyes, through Memory’s magic, see a face
That shed, long years ago, a reliance there,
A form adorned that graced a vacant chair.
How rich and full was life, how barren now!
Forsaken in our poverty we bow
To Fate’s decree. But in despairing mood
Kind Memory, pitying, shares our solitude.

Are memories but the vain desire
For happier hours that once were mine?
The embers of a dying fire.
The dwindled lees of life’s rich wine?
Or echoes from a seraph’s lyre
But lightly touched by hands divine?

THE STOKER

_While a student at college, I voyaged to Naples in the steerage
of an Italian liner. That was long before the days of the modern
oil burner and the engine room was a fair reproduction of Dante’s
Inferno. One afternoon a young stoker, begrimed and perspiring,
crept up the iron ladder from the stoke hold and sat for a few
minutes gazing out of an open port. His wistful face remains a
vivid memory and occasioned the following lines._

Framed in the iron port there looms a face
That Rembrandt’s stilus or the sombre muse
Of Dante might have etched. Pale cheeks and eyes
That gaze unseeing, out - a forehead damp
With sweat and smeared with grime - a haunting face
Through which there peers in wistful apathy
A parched and withered soul. Some stoker crept,
Gasping for air up from that hell below,
Of lurid fires and gloom, where engines groan
Like blinded Titans, and with giant strength
Shoulder the huge hulk forward through the brine.

What thoughts beguile the furrows of that brow
Does he perchance, recall the sunlit days
Of childhood in some cottage gay with flowers
Where Italy, enthroned among her rocks
Broods o’er her vanished grandeur? Does the spell
Of romance conjure up the golden past
When his proud forbears bore the pomp of Rome
To seas remote, when Roman legions ruled
The servile world? Did he in flaunting crest,
And burnished armour tread the galley deck?
Or did a scourging destiny condemn
His pain wracked shoulders to the oaken oar?

To his dulled ears float strains of music sweet
From gilded cabins where the zest of life
Enthralls the voyagers, while his the hand
That drives the moving palace on her course
Through seas of shimmering light. A gnome begrimed,
Breathing foul dust and blistered by the heat
In caverns far below. A galley slave
Heaving and straining at a deadlier oar -
An iron bar that burns the calloused palm.

Whene’er the furnace gapes its dragon jaws
And blasts him with its breath, with reckless hand
He flings his youth into that Moloch’s maw!
And his reward? O bargain infamous
A mess of pottage for a birth right riven
Like Esau’s ancient sin. Repulsive fare
A stinking hole to kennel like a cur
Battling with vermin, foul and desperate
Too bitter punishment for branded crime.

Chained by the manacles of circumstance
To Vulcan’s smoking forge, a fate more dire
Than once befell Prometheus wracked upon
His cross of crags on grizzled Caucausus;
With every shovel speed the winged hours
His hopes, his dreams, his life but sordid lumps
Of coal to feed those flames insatiate.
Then Death, the pitiful, brings welcome rest.
His body, warped and shrivelled, slides adown
The tilted hatchway, weighted at the feet
A burned out clinker cast into the sea!

IMAGINATION

Blest Being from some happier sphere
O bend thy luminous footsteps near
Were Heaven’s gates ajar,
When down a moonlit path you came
With dazzling smile and wings of flame
Fair as the morning star?

Imagination, radiant sprite
With crescent crown and stars bedight,
And seraph’s eyes;
O guide us up that filmy stair
By ladders raised on buoyant air
To vaulting skies!

Imagination is the singing rhyme
In life’s dull prose.
She blooms among the cruel thorns of time
A beauteous rose.
No Circe’s spell is hers, the poppy’s lure
From present pain
In drug engendered dreams; but calm and pure
Is her sweet reign.
Her finger traces in the storm cloud gray
The rainbow’s arc;
She sees within the gnarled volcanic clay
The diamond’s spark;
Forecasts the harvests in the sodded rows
The plough shares fling;
When all the world is buried neath the snows
She dreams of spring.
The cave man followed up the savage road
The torch she bore,
She marks within life’s rock encumbered lode
The glinting ore.
Imagination melts in purple mist
The jagged peaks;
And petty things yield to this alchemist
The gold she seeks.
No priestess of illusions, vague, unreal
And not of earth,
She rather helps us know and see and feel
A thing’s true worth.

Along the wistful trail of yesterdays
Backward sad Memory directs her gaze
And points her withered hand.
“Tomorrow” is the magic word that cheers
Imagination onward through the years
Where lies her promised land.

Imagination only can explain
Those jewelled etchings on our window pane
By fairies of the frost;
From icy peaks and breaker fretted seas
To elven glens beneath snow laden trees
So cunningly embossed.

Calm reason tells us there is nothing there
But mists congealing in the frosted air;
’Tis false, calm reason lies.
For in that witching square the eye beholds
A glittering world of wonder that unfolds
Its luminious mysteries.